Buffalo Zine strips fashion media bare in a phone-shot issue with no cover

Buffalo Zine, the London biannual founded by Adrián González-Cohen and David Uzquiza, reached its 21st issue in 2025 facing what many independents face: shrinking brand support, real money problems and an uncertain future, in an industry obsessed with AI-era perfection. The obvious answer — borrow harder, produce glossier — was out of reach and out of character.

So the magazine inverted the formula. Issue 21 was shot almost entirely on phones with no models, stylists, hair or makeup artists. Everyone in it belongs to the world the magazine covers — people who work in or live around fashion, wearing their own clothes mixed with items brands lent them, each look assembled by its wearer. There was no script and no moodboard: the point was style as it exists in life, in gestures, not as aspiration.

The form matched the message. The issue had no front cover: the first pages of every copy were torn off, so each copy begins at a different, random page and readers land mid-story. In place of an editor's letter, the founders printed a conversation between themselves about the precarious nature of independent publishing and the state of the industry.

The strategy turned constraint into editorial direction — 'a shift away from aspiration, toward presence', as the magazine put it. The 300-page issue won a D&AD 2026 Yellow Pencil in Magazine & Newspaper Design and was championed by independent magazine shops as proof of what print can still say.